Saturday, October 22, 2011

Scotto knows best

That skilled foreign policy team of Romney and Brown are dissing Barack Obama over the US troop withdrawal from Iraq by Dec. 31. Too bad they don't know the facts.

In yet another example of knee-jerk Republican opposition, the Massachusetts junior senator and the Republican presidential front-runner are objecting to Obama following through on an agreement negotiated by George W. Bush four years ago, with military concurrence.

And it follows a decision by the Iraqi government to stand firm on the agreement, even as the US side looked to maintain a minimal presence. As the National Journal reports:

President Obama’s speech formally declaring that the last 43,000 U.S. troops will leave Iraq by the end of the year was designed to mask an unpleasant truth: The troops aren’t being withdrawn because the U.S. wants them out. They’re leaving because the Iraqi government refused to let them stay.

No matter for the Colonial Twins. Brown, whose National Guard JAG status should make him a believer in international law and agreements, says that a:

... rush to the exits will create an irreplaceable void and put at risk the gains made by our troops and Iraqi military partners.’’

“naked political calculation or simply sheer ineptitude in negotiations with the Iraqi government.”

Whatever happened to the old attitude that political posturing ended at the water's edge?

So in that spirit, let us recall the war in Iraq was wrong in two major categories: Saddam Hussein had no ties to al Qaeda and he possessed no weapons of mass destruction.

Bush administration deceit costs us thousands of American lives in taking our eyes off the prize in Afghanistan and trillions of dollars in rebuilding two countries we have helped to tear apart by wars.

And it helped to bankrupt the American economy so we don't have the same resources to invest in our own nation that we do to build the roads, bridges and schools we are constructing in Iraq and Afghanistan.